Spatial data management of cultural and environmental ... · Cultural and environmental heritage find their place among the theme of protected sites. The field of heritage protection

INSPIRE Conference, Krakow 22-25 June, 2010

Spatial data management of cultural and environmental

heritage: @tlante geo-portal for historic cartography in

Lombardy

R. Brumana, B. Cuca, M. Scaioni

Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Building Environment Science & Technology Department (B.E.S.T.)


2The project Atl@nte

• Framework of this research: Italian project Atl@nte (2009-

2011) funded by CARIPLO Fundation, Milano (Italy)

• Aim: to built up an SDI of historical cadastral and

topographical maps of Lombardia, intergated to modern

geoDBs

• Partners:

Politecnico di Milano, Dept. B.E.S.T. (project leader)

National Archive of Milano (ASMi)

Cadastral Administration (Agenzia del Territorio – AdT)

Centro Studi PIM

Regional Administration of Lombardia

Municipality of Gorgonzola (Lombardia)

CILEA inter-universitary consortium


3Why the on-line publication of historical

cadastral maps?

• Activation of the first release of geoportal Atl@nte (public presentation on 19 Jan 2010)

• Current available @ URL: www.atlantestoricolombardia.it

• Finalities: Cultural: to rise the “consciousness of the landscape”

as a source of welfare, culture, historical memory and identity, to be transmitted to the future, by increasing the number of people who can access historical maps, now available only to a few technicians

Technical: to introduce the use of historical information into the land planning process and as a tool to recognize the public property extension

http://www.atlantestoricolombardia.it/


4Historical cadastral maps for land planning

purpose

- Land planning, especially in urban areas, is

currently based on analysys:

- As-built situation (geoDBs)

- Social and economical analyses

- Integration to the surrounding region

- Added-value of using historical maps:

- To respect the traditional character of a given area

(agricultural, industrial, residential, touristic,

religiouos…)

- Recognize the presence of old settlements and

possible archeological sites

- Understanding the old water and canal networks

(flooding vulnerability)


5Structure of the geo-portal

Geographical access to

georeferenced maps

Non-geographic catalogue

of old cadastres

Thematic sections

(in the 2° year)


6Technical problems confronted during the

first year of Atl@nte project

• Publication of small scale chorographic maps of old

cadastres:

„Corografie delle Provincie del Regno Lombardo-Veneto‟, from

1836 (at scale 1:115,000)

„Carta del Territorio del Milanese e del Mantovano‟, 1788-1796 (at

scale 1:86,400)

„Carta del Regno Lombardo-Veneto‟, 1833 (at scale 1:86,400)

• Chorographic maps are the framework of (old and current)

cadastral maps of municipalities (scale 1:2,000)

• Old large scale cadastral maps are undergoing a

digitalization process to be published on-line

• Publication of chorographic maps can help to access to

large scale cadastral maps in both cases of geographic

and catalogue access


7Georeferencing of chorographic maps

• Chorographic maps do not report any mapping grid, even

though they derive from the generalization of large scale

cadastral maps (these referred to a geodetic framework)

• Geographic publication needs georeferencing

• Use of current Italian mapping grids to allow comparison

to up-to-date data:

Gauss-Boaga (datum “Roma 1940”)

UTM-WGS84 (datum “ETRF89”)

• Registration carried out by using vector layers of

municipalities boundary from the regional geoDb

(1:100,000)

• Boundaries and other physical features adopted as

reference points for computing an affine transformation (6

parameters)


8Example of result after georeferencing


9Analysis of results

• Apart a few modification of some boundaries, results show

a paradox:

Somewhere a perfect correspondence after the computed

transformation

Somewhere else significant shifts of large portions of a boundary,

without any evident systematic error on the whole original sheet

• Possible source of errors:

Construction process of the chorographic maps (generalization of

large scale cadastral maps at 1:2,000 scale)

Deformation over the time of hard-maps

Digitalization process (under investigation)

Errors due to the georeferencing procedure

• Uncorrect modelling

• Uncorrect reference points identification


10Quality assesment of primary data

• In-depth analysis of maps of Gorgonzola:1. Georeferencing of

chorographic map including Gorgonzola town

2. Georeferencing of all 16 large scale (1:2,000) cadastral sheets: results coherent with the expected map tolerance

3. Comparison of municipality‟s borders obtained from (2) with respect to the ones from (1): presence of significant discrepancies

4. Conclusion: the process for the generation of chorographies from large scale maps was not rigourous


11Issues concerning quality of georeferencing

• Use of affine transformation motivated by its easy

implementation in GIS platform (TWF files)

• A preliminary test was performed to check how many

reference points have to be used in order to:

reduce the man work

keep a good geometric quality

• Reference points selected among features which are

expected to be persistent along time

• Homogeneous and regular distribution of points on each

sheet

• Reference quality for chorographic maps: tolerance of

modern maps at the same scale (1:100,000): t~50 m


12Results of the test

Sheet # reference

points

Residual

total RMS error error min. error max.

Milano 6 22 m 2 m 34 m

Milano 9 35 m 14 m 56 m

Milano 30 169 m 57 m 255 m

Milano 35 196 m 48 m 367 m

Milano 52 307 m 33 m 546 m

Milano 203 178 m 27 m 297 m

Milano 232 210 m 41 m 440 m

• By increasing the number of points, errors become larger

accordingly (no direct dependency)

• Solutions with many points adopted to privilege a less precise but

most accurate georeferencing

• The same strategy was adopted for other sheets, with largely

different results between different sheets


13Implementation of the geoportal

• The geo-portal was conceived in open-source WEB-GIS

technology and to provide Web Map Services (WMS)

• Developed using Geoserver, an Open Geospatial

Consortium (OGC) application, in order to ensure

interoperability requisite (by CILEA)

• Needs of the end-users:

Discovery: finding data of particular interest over a specific

region through metadata catalogues

Viewer : consultation and evaluation of sample data and

detailed reports to help the user determine if the data is of

their interest;

Access: order, package and delivery data (off-line or on-line)

Exploitation: data use by the consumer for their own

purpose


14

Documentation: Documentation of historical buildings

Cataloguing: Digital Databases

Virtual Reconstruction of lost scenery

Representation: Digital memory

Monitoring for research: up datable databases

Production of copies or relevant parts

Conservation/Preventive maintenance:Documentation of restoration done

Planning of future actions

Digital simulation of different possibilities

Dissemination / valorization:Multimedia applications

Visualization and Discovery: Interactive actions

Virtualized heritage

DATA LAYER:

Photogrammetry +

laser scanner data+

Topography data

USER INTERFACE

LAYER:

Virtual Museums,

web geo-portals ect.

SERVICE LAYER:

Discovery

Visualizer

Meta data editor

Spatial Data

Infrastructures

Platform for

Cultural heritage

Methodology for publication of Cultural

Heritage geodata (1)


15

Use Case Model as illustrated within INSPIRE data specification document on Protected

Sites (September 2009)

Bodies/institutes

involved in CH

protection and

documentation

Architects/Planners

involved in conservation

projects; local

authorities

Regional authorities;

Public administration.

Professional in the field

Visitor/Student/Virtual

tourist

Methodology for publication of Cultural

Heritage geodata (2)


16INSPIRE DIRECTIVE - Metadata aspects

The rising need for SDI distributed services calls for standards and indications definition.

Objectives:

- provide identification of the information resource for which metadata is created i.e. give

the classification and identification of: geographic location and temporal reference,

quality&validity, conformity with implementing rules on the interoperability, constraints

related to access and use, and organisation responsible for the resource.

- provide homogeneous metadata scenarios;

- promote data sharing at international level via web.

Metadata on metadata record itself needed to monitor, up date and ensure the

maintenance of the metadata.

INSPIRE Instruments: Metadata Editor and Metadata Validator in form of prototype

Spatial dataset | Spatial dataset series | Spatial data service

National legislation and indications fundamental for further implementation!


17INSPIRE DIRECTIVE - Metadata aspects

Cultural and environmental heritage find their place among the theme of protected sites.

The field of heritage protection and conservation is strongly subjected to case-by-case

analysis need for some special attention from geospatial data community.

Example of xml metadata file

still some complex but precious work to be done!


18

Geo-portal as a single access point to distributed geospatial sources.

GeoServer allows publishing of geospatial data with OGC compliant communication standards

Portal Services

a single access point to resources and services available;

administration functions and management of the portal.

Access to services:

Visualization client - the visualization and navigation interface of available resources

Research client - the instruments for queries and localization of resources based on characters

defined by the user

Publication Client - administrator or another authorized user to publish resources

Gazetteer client - allows geographical queries based on toponyms

Catalogue Services

the catalogue services provide instruments to classify, register, query, manage and use metadata and

geospatial services; metadata can be obtained and queried via catalogue service in order to evaluate

(within more advanced systems), invoke and obtain the resource described by metadata themselves.

Presentation service

are services dedicated to visualisation and navigation of geospatial data

Data Services

services that provide access to geographical data found in repository o data banks

Geo-portal as a single access point to distributed

geospatial sources


19Publication of chorographies on the

geoportal

• After georeferencing, each map in TIFF+TWF format was

exposed through Geoserver as WMS


20Some details

The integration of old maps to

features of the current geoDB

allows to directly access large scale

sheets in the same region (also the

ones not yet georeferenced)


21Thematic sections

• Different thematic sections are under development

• Thematic section: “Water & Territory”

Agriculture

Historical

buildings

Parks and

gardens

River

boundaries

Archaeolog

ical traces

Hill and

mountain

landscape


22

Cross-correlation between

themes

example of “Water” topic

Annex I

Addresses

Cadastrial parcels

Hydrography

Protected sites

Annex II

Land cover – Orthoimagery

Annex III

Buildings

Agricultural and aquacultural

facilities

INSPIRE DIRECTIVE - Annex Themes


23

Buildings

Cadastral

parcels

Addressesort

ho

imagery

Elevation

- costlines

Geographical

names

Administrative

units

Artificial

infrastructures

PROTECTED SITES

Land cover

Hydrography

INSPIRE DIRECTIVE - Annex Themes


24The Martesana canal


25Some details on 17th century maps


26Other old maps in Milano

• To evaluate the path of Martesana canal inside and

outside the city of Milano in past centuries, other maps

were georeferenced

• In Milano the following ones are used:

Teresian Cadastre (6 sheets used at scale 1:2,000);

Map of the Astronomers from Brera (39 sheets at scale 1:1,000)


27Suggestions: possible uses of historical

maps in comarison to the current ones

• After georeferencing, old maps can be overlapped to the up-to-date ones

• Several analysis are possible

1. Change of river-over time (and properties directly facing the river)

2. Change of road paths


28Conclusions and future work

• On-line publication of historical metric maps in Atl@nte can provide a synthetic and continuous vision of the territory, at different historical levels

• Comparison between landscape of yesterday, today and tomorrow (land planning) becomes easier for both cultural and technical purposes

• Several technical aspects are related and still open: Automation of georeferencing (looking for reference points in automatic way)

Analysis of errors and improvements of the adopted geometric models

Quality control (map scanning, georeferencing)

Accessibility to on-line very large map archives through WMS

Metadata Implementation, as requested by INSPIRE directive

Study of different INSPIRE themes related

• Development of planned activities of the Atl@nte project: Thematic sessions

Integration of terrestrial data (UAV-based, laser scanning)

Publication of 3D data (metadata, up-dated geoDb, PEM, DTM, …)


THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!

www.atlantestoricolombardia.it

http://www.atlantestoricolombardia.it/

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Spatial data management of cultural and environmental ... · Cultural and environmental heritage find their place among the theme of protected sites. The field of heritage protection